October 07, 2009

Fighting a Big War With a Short Stick in the Big 12

There's trouble brewing in the Big 12, which has evolved into a league of haves and have-nots.

North Division members Iowa State, Kansas State and Colorado are being left in the financial dust by free-spending Texas, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Lee Barfknecht of the Omaha World-Herald breaks it down this way: Texas makes about $7 million for a home game with its stadium capacity of 101,000. Nebraska makes about $4.5 million with its 85,000 seats.

Iowa State, Kansas State and Colorado, each with stadiums seating slightly more than 50,000, bring in about $1.2 million to $1.5 million per home game.

Barfknecht writes: "Multiply that differential by seven games a year, stretch that over four or five years and you can see why Texas has flat-screen TVs in its football complex bathrooms while other schools are happy to find soap and paper towels."

Colorado is in the worst shape of the bottom dwellers. The Dan Hawkins hire looks more disastrous by the day and the athletic department is carrying millions in debt.

Bill Snyder is back at Kansas State, but a second Manhattan Miracle is a longshot. The athletic department must first pay off all the secret insider deals it made the past few years, including a $3.2 million deal with former coach Ron Prince.

Iowa State appears to have caught a break when Gene Chizik, who was athletic director Jamie Pollard's supposed superstar hire, left for Auburn after going 5-19 in two seasons. Hiring Paul Rhoads, Barfknecht writes, was "a good first step. But it's only the first step in a long road ahead, with no shortcuts evident and no monster money flowing in."

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Two things--one, the Big XII wouldn't be in this mess if Texas wasn't such a prissy belladonna and blocked the Big XII Office (a.k.a. the University of Texas Irving Extension office) from exploring a television channel (or merger with existing conference-themed channels).

Two, these are some of the same schools that decided to screw the big power of the day (read; Nebraska) when the Big XII was formed by siding with the Texas schools regarding division of television contracts, Prop 42 kids, and the overall conference alignment. If anything, what goes around comes around--Nebraska is looking like it's regaining it's former prestige, and those that sold out to the Texas conference killers are getting their (just?) deserts.

Its called capitalism baby! Win & you make money. Lose and you don't. It's pretty simple. Texas makes that money because they win 10 games a year. Iowa State doesn't. Period, end of story.

There are plenty of teams out there without Texas-sized budgets (Boise, TCU, Cincinnati to name a few) that are doing just fine. Im tired of reading about crappy team blaming the money. Especially Colorado...its not Texas' or Nebraska's fault that Colorado hired Gary Barnett and then hired Dan Hawkins.

I once heard the Big 12 TV contract doles out part of the money based on how often a team appears on television. So if Texas is on tv on a week ISU isn't, then the Longhorns get like $150,000 more than the Cyclones in just one week.

If the northern teams start asking for much more revenue sharing, I am sure Utah, TCU, Houston, BYU, or many other teams would love to switch places.

It is true that the Big 12 divides much of its television revenue according to appearances. Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard lobbied for Big 12 to change its policy and adopt the Big Ten model, where teams share all TV revenue equally. He was shot down.